sarah cole
various participants in the Trojan War (or in the Second World War, or in any
war);and, even more minutely, it aligns the implements of war with the bodies of
its participants (the armour and spears and chariots with the very sinews of the
fighter’s limbs). It is not that war, in Weil’s rendering, eliminates ethical boundaries
and differences, but that the regime of force transforms all the players into actors
in its own drama; it marks, dominates, and dictates, and yet in restructuring the
world, it remains aloof from any given subject, any given death. As Weil has it,
‘violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. It comes to seem just as external
to its employer as to its victim.’^18
There are many ways to conceptualize force in theIliad. Weil herself is particularly
drawn towards images of victimization and mercilessness—war as a kind of cosmic
executioner. One might turn, too, to the hundreds of ruined bodies that litter the
plain of Troy, killed in stunning plethora and exactitude. Are there this many ways,
one might well ask, for the body, armed and shielded, carefully arrayed by artists
no less than bronze-smiths, to be penetrated and destroyed? To give just a few of
the myriad forms of dying in theIliad:
and Pallas Athene guided the weapon
to the nose next to the eye, and cut on through the white teeth
and the bronze weariless shore all the way through the tongue’s base
so that the spearhead came out underneath the jawbone.
He dropped then from the chariot and his armour clattered upon him,
dazzling armour and shining, while those fast-running horses
shied away, and there his life and strength were scattered.
(5. 290–6)He bent dropping his head to one side, as a garden poppy
bends beneath the weight of its yield and the rains of springtime;
so his head bent slack to one side beneath the helm’s weight.
(8. 306–8)It was Sarpedon’s companion in arms, high-hearted Epikles,
whom he struck with a great jagged stone, that lay at the inside
of the wall, huge, on top of the battlements. A man could not easily
hold it, not even if he were very strong, in both hands,
of men such as men are now, but he heaving it high threw it,
and smashed in the four-sheeted helm, and pounded to pieces
the bones of the head inside it, so that Epikles dropped
like a diver from the high bastion, and the life left his bones.
(12. 379–86)With the scale of bodily dismemberment so vast, it is remarkable that no death
is left without its vibrant narrative moment, its instant of visible incarnation. The
(^18) Simone Weil,The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, 19.